Faimon Roberts: Spring, the time of sports renewal

Ah, spring. The time when fragile new plants ease forward from the earth, turning their tender shoots to the life-giving warmth of the sun.

Faimon Roberts

Ah, spring. The time when fragile new plants ease forward from the earth, turning their tender shoots to the life-giving warmth of the sun.

The time when nature is renewed, new calves and lambs dot the landscape and a refreshingly warm breeze tickles the nostrils.

Spring is a time when baseball players report for spring training, and on fields bright green and freshly mowed, play pepper and spit sunflower seeds.

The NBA begins its stretch run after the All-Star break, and some teams make trades in hopes of playing deep into May or June.

Spring is the point in the year when NASCAR fires up its internal combustion machines of tomorrow and begins anew to run them in never-ending circles of tedium. Is it odd that the Car of Tomorrow only turns left?

Oops, I promised myself I wouldn't take any more shots at NASCAR.

But spring seems different nowadays.

Instead of freshly mowed grass at spring training, we get carefully arranged chairs at choreographed press conferences, like Alex Rodriguez's this year.

There stood the perfectly complected, well-spoken Rodriguez, biting his lip and doing his best Tom Hanks impersonation.

It wasn't working for me, though.

Rodriguez told a story of cousins, the Dominican Republic, and clandestine injections. He bit his lip and choked back emotion, or fear, or confusion, or a belch, for a full 37 seconds before saying simply "Thank you" to his teammates.

He must have been thanking them for all of those anonymously sourced stories about what a nutter he is.

Maybe he was thanking them for helping lure him to the Yankees on the promise of championships only to engage in a colossal choke job each year.

Even better, the steroid press-conference is becoming a yearly ritual for these Yankees. In 2005, it was Jason Giambi. Last year, Andy Pettitte. This year, the Miami Muscle was forced to admit that even he, of the deity-like talent, had dabbled in baseball’s black bag.

This whole scene was more stage-managed than "Cats" and cheesier than an Abba reunion.
But enough about that.

At least this past weekend, we could expect to be treated to one exceptional sporting event - the Daytona 500. NASCAR, confusingly, runs its biggest race first, and it goes down in Florida.

There would be no talk of steroids at Daytona. Heck, most NASCAR drivers couldn't inject a steroid unless it came in a can of Natty Light. The only performance enhancers in NASCAR are the engineers, who if they worked for NASA would've already planted a big Winston Tobacco logo on Mars.

But this year's race was so exciting that the driver who won it found out that he won it while sitting in his idling car on pit row in the rain.

Nothing get's your pulse pounding like a called finish to a rain-shortened event that can't be completed the next day because the teams have to be in California four days later. And most of them had to go from Daytona to Charlotte and then to California. I guess they really do just love driving.

As for the NBA, the All-Star game provide a few highlights, but the most exciting moment was Shaquille O'Neal emerging with a dance troupe during introductions, and then doing a planned dance that only a 7-foot-1, 325-pound man could pull off without someone else calling him a sissy.

The trade deadline was quiet, too, with one deal being rescinded and many of the major players not moving.

Spring may have disappointed to this point, but it's about to get a lot better. High school baseball and softball are cranking up, we are getting closer to the Masters, which will be featuring a robo-knee'd Tiger Woods, more Terminator-like than ever. And just in the distant future we can just start to hear the clash of pads that signals spring football.